Reimaging National Belonging: Post-Civil War El Salvador in Global Context / Robin Maria / 2014

Reimaging National Belonging: Post-Civil War El Salvador in Global Context / Robin Maria / 2014 

A foundational text in Central American studies, RNB is an anthropologist’s take on postwar El Salvador that succinctly provides introductory political clarity. It captures the consequences of the ARENA’s years in power on education and national history, as well as the failures of justice and political accountability. I recommend this book to every undergrad and grad Salvadoran because DeLugan’s approach is the first idea many of my friends had when conceiving their research projects carried into fruition by a professional. It also provides clarity on how mestizaje has played out in a contemporary context.  4/5

Does Your House Have Lions / Sonia Sanchez / 1997

Does Your House Have Lions / Sonia Sanchez / 1997 

A hypnotic song of grief, love, and loss, DYHHL will heat your heart the same way a sad earworm of a tune will wreck you no matter when and where you hear it. Sanchez delivers a rhyming blues with a mastery and charge worthy of her reputation. 4.5/5

Dracula / Bram Stoker / 1897

Dracula / Bram Stoker / 1897

An addictive novel written in the epistolary form, the language of Bram Stoker’s classic aged like fine wine, capturing the introspective intensity of the era with delightful turns of language. Like a good rollercoaster, Stoker lets you watch a character’s doom approach without sacrificing any of the delight in the story when they plunge. It provides an interesting glimpse into the racial and class biases of the era with elements that should interest folks in the medical humanities, ethnic studies, and horror fanatics alike. Stoker’s Christian overtones were a little goofy but fine. I would love to discuss with a solid feminist about the portrayal of Mena and Stoker’s intentions there, as to me the sexism of the men proves to be the greatest weakness in their strategy to defeat Dracula. The novel has the men sideline Mena, a thorough and thoughtful organizer and strategist, because she is a woman in a way that seems aware of the foolishness of the move. The novel then still plays Mena out as the ideal victim and deferent woman, even after she’s reinstated into the team by necessity. Either way, I deeply enjoyed this book. 5/5 

Frankenstein / Mary Shelley / 1818

Frankenstein / Mary Shelley / 1818

Shelley has this delightful Russian doll of a narrative style where one narrator tells the story someone else told them, who in their story will tell the story someone else told them, and so forth. The primary narrators, Captain Walton and Victor Frankstein, are remarkably like one another, both shame-ridden, earnest and ambitious men, searching for approval and success. Captain Walton’s pitiful inferiority complex and lack of worldly knowledge is as funny as it is foreboding and worrisome. It’s easy to hate Frankenstein as has such a poisonously guilt-ridden narration. The foil between these characters provides fodder for conversations about stigma, racialization, shame, and nurture vs nature. This is an absolutely curious text racially, as the monster feels like a pretty obvious stand-in for a colonized other. The plot runs pretty tight, it’s just feels incredibly stupid at times because all Frankenstein had to do was open up to the right people or really anyone and a lot of the turmoil of the conflict could’ve been resolved radically differently and better for him. I was a bit disappointed to find that the monster basically talked like a 19th century gentleman, although it was hilarious to get the scene of the monster philosophizing about the impact Paradise Lost had on the development of his consciousness. 

4/5

O, Body / Dan “Sully” Sullivan / 2024

O, Body / Dan “Sully” Sullivan / 2024

I somehow ended up at the Green MIll Poetry Slam last Sunday, the original poetry slam hosted by Marc Smith, and lo and behold, a long lost friend Sully was featuring. It was a joy to see him in his element, getting ruckus with an audience for tender poems about fatphobia, family, and Chicago. I wouldn’t reduce the poems in O, Body to tavern poems, however. What’s awesome about the range of Sully’s craft is the same poem that might be a real loud one on stage can also be a sweet, gentle one on the page. O, Body offers a rich field to folks interested in writing about fat and masculinity. The poems slide between moments of insecurity and moments of deep presence within the body. In O, Body, Sully wields craft without taking himself too seriously, sidestepping the main character syndrome of so much contemporary poetics for poems that focus on family and the home we create for ourselves. In this way, Sully helps me laugh, not take myself so damn seriously, and focus on things that matter most. 4 out 5. 

Bread and Circus / Airea D. Matthews / 2023

Goddamn. Matthews has both childhood trauma and academic poetic muscles at intense levels. There’s a poem where a therapist asks the speaker to talk about a moment she didn’t regret and the speaker talks about helping her father shoot heroin once. I would completely understand it if a poet with this extreme of a memory bank to draw from spent their whole lives writing sobbing confessional poems, just trying to bear witness and heal. Matthews manages to do so much more than that. There are erasure poems of economic theory (Adam Smith and Guy Debord) that make the reader consider the ways the speaker’s womanhood, and in turn the trauma the world has given her, has been commodified and the violence therein. While some of the erasure poems aren’t mindblowing, they do an excellent job of teasing out how violent public systems create these intense personal traumas. To read Bread and Circus is to sit with someone who has extraordinary life experience AND has done an incredible amount of work to contextualize and think critically about it. 4 out of 5. 

I Ching / David Hinton / Ancient to 2015

I Ching / David Hinton / Ancient to 2015

In an effort to familiarize myself with the Eastern canon and Daoism better, I listened to the I Ching. It was dramatically apparent that listening to the I Ching front to back is a wrongheaded approach to engaging with the text. Traditionally, readers roll dice that add up to a hexagram and flip to the corresponding page. Once there, they read a mix of symbols, images, and sometimes didactic, sometimes mysterious aphorisms. In this way, the practice feels like a cousin to tarot. It’s up to interpreters to figure out how to apply the meaning to their own lives. Drawing from the depths of millennia of Chinese culture, the texts frequently uses natural and feudal imagery. It’s also poetry, as in the original Chinese, one line may be read eight different ways, a tool that obviously works brilliantly for an interpretative, fortune-telling text. I prefer this practice to contemporary astrology and tarot, which requires one to either acquire a whole set of new vocabularies to play with or find a charismatic practitioner to really get something interesting. I like the I Ching because it gives me a poem to play with, and since its wisdom is generally Daoist, I typically find something that more or less aligns with my sense of values anyway. In any case, here’s an online version if you are desperate enough to reach towards the supernatural these days: https://www.ichingonline.net/ The I Ching can only get a 5/5, rational thinkers stay mad!

The Gravedigger’s Archeology / William Archila / 2015

The Gravedigger’s Archeology / William Archila / 2015

Another haunting collection by Archila, exploring exile and war through a bluesy voice. This time, Archila employs longer sentences, like a repeated splash of piano keys, that sometimes wash over the reader. It’s harder to pin down this violence, almost like the more one digs the less earth one is standing on. It’s a worthy follow-up to the Art of Exile and fans of that will likely have more to love. 4 out of 5. 

The Communist Manifesto / Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels / 1848

The Communist Manifesto / Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels / 1848

I picked up the Penguin edition, which was front loaded with a ton of critical material that was useful to understanding the reception of the text, the history of its ideas, and Marx and Engels as figures. I skipped the last half of these essays, as I wanted to get to the legendary manifesto already, although after listening to the manifesto, I realized the essays would have served me better and proved more informative. While I can appreciate the manifesto, especially as it lays out its principles, and its biting humor about false socialisms and the bourgeoisie, a lot of its key revolutionary ideas I’ve already encountered updated in other texts. I don’t know if I’m ever going to read Das Kapital, but for now, I’m moving onto Lenin and others in my quest to better understand Marxism. 3 out of 5. 

The Souls of Black Folk / W.E.B. Du Bois / 1903

The Souls of Black Folk / W.E.B. Du Bois / 1903

I’ve read chapters of this book during my degrees and decided I had to return to read the whole thang to understand the Black Radical Tradition better. Du Bois pours his soul into every word of the text, diving between astute economic and historical truth-telling, musical criticism, and personal essays on Atlanta and the lives of everyday Black folk in the Jim Crow south. It’s all the more painful to see Du Bois’s legacy so under-talked about and misrepresented as a mere counterpoint to Booker T. Washington. It was painful to read his chapter on education, which might as well be about contemporary under-funded schools in the US. This round of reading helped really color in the picture of just how fucked the South was economically before and after the Civil War, especially during the Reconstruction period. Du Bois’s thoroughness is so earnest and unearned by this country. Amerikkka did not and does not deserve souls as beautiful as Du Bois. 5/5 

Handbook of Restorative Justice / edited by Gerry Johnstone and Daniel V. Van Ness / 2011

Handbook of Restorative Justice / edited by Gerry Johnstone and Daniel V. Van Ness / 2011 

I’m so grateful for this book. At over 600 pages, it goes through chapter by chapter tackling critical issues in restorative justice, from its philosophical underpinnings, its history, the rationale of its procedural variations and its evaluative criteria, and more. The wisdom in this book is through the roof and articulated with a clear-eyed thoughtfulness, chapter after chapter. Contemporary pop abolitionists frequently point to the terror of mass incarceration and its impact without adequately drawing a picture of what a world without mass incarceration would look like. Restorative justice has well thought out plans and answers in this regard that, yes, do need more experimentation, but do offer viable alternatives. I especially appreciate its philosophical wrestling with the need for coercion in cases of persistent violence and its focus on the lack of rehabilitative services for victims, as a part of its vision. Beyond the rhetorics of marxism and decolonization, the books on restorative justice that I have read are the ones that have provided me with the greatest sense of clarity and hope about the future I want.  

There’s only two larger shortcomings with this collection I think are worth quibbling with: 1) The first is minor. They include a chapter on Christianity that misses the mark entirely imo, as it spends time going back and forth with different interpretations of the Bible and its forms of justice, losing itself in the debate. This sidesteps what is most interesting about Christianity’s relationship to restorative justice: a) Christians have led the way in many places in developing restorative justice. The authors acknowledge this and use this as justification for including the chapter, but they never talk about WHY that may be the case. My suspicion is that few religions have circled the ideas of sin and forgiveness than Christians. Through Christ, EVERYONE can be forgiven and I think this sincere belief gives ordinary people the strength to do the work of restorative justice. I’m curious how other ordinary people develop this strength, but anyone who spends time in prisons knows that Christians are some of the few people who dedicate themselves to serving the incarcerated. Many of the incarcerated, especially those who have committed heinous crimes, rely on Christianity to survive mass incarceration and forgive themselves. Under extreme duress, many humans reach towards the supernatural, of course. But I am hungry to read something that unpacks the layers here about the role of Christianity for both practitioners of RJ and victims of the system and how ordinary non-Christians can develop some of the muscles that best Christian RJ practitioners seem to have. 

2) There’s a chapter on the role of police in RJ. The authors ultimately conclude that there’s no data that suggests that police participation in RJ is more harmful than not. Just as some folks feel alienated by police, others feel safer, and the authors ultimately conclude that it’ll depend on the community, relationships built therein, and there’s no reason to rule it out entirely. I’m sure they didn’t misread their data, but here’s a place where ideology and the history of policing in the US at large do have tremendous insights and why that isn’t a good idea. The role of police officers and the tools they have would need to be completely reimagined under RJ and it was strange to encounter a chapter that basically opened the door to intersecting with traditional justice systems without challenging some of the fundamental issues of power and relations that exist between community members and traditional police forces. How cool would it have been to have a chapter that used RJ to reimagine what services would exist in lieu of police or how coercion would operate under RJ in necessary situations. 

While not exactly reflected in this little book review, my takeaways were ultimately largely positive and an immense sense of gratitude for having found a community of people approaching the work with the right spirit. 4.8/5

Wovoka: The Life and Legacy of the Prophet of the Ghost Dance Movement / Charles Rivers Editors / 2022

Wovoka: The Life and Legacy of the Prophet of the Ghost Dance Movement / Charles Rivers Editors / 2022 

I first learned about Wovoka in Our History is Our Future by Nick Estes and was moved to learn of a Paiute prophet so central to Native American history, because the Paiute are particularly marginalized and humiliated in Native American history. Sold to the Spanish as slaves by both the Utes and Dine, they weren’t particularly renowned for their military skills. Their own original story pokes fun at this hierarchy, humbly and humorously claiming their people were brown because they were made out of shit. I’m drawn to Wovoka’s story because it gives Paiutes a pretty central role in US Native history. Charles Rivers Editors did an excellent job contextualizing Wovoka’s teachings within a global indigenous context, drawing parallels in Africa and the Pacific. Essentially, in the face of genocide and a dramatic change of lifestyle, there’s a strain of indigenous thought that conservatively retreats into tradition, claiming that if indigenous folks dig their heels into their spiritual practice, the gods will vanquish their colonizers for them. In Wovoka’s case, this is the spirit dance and ceremony. The spirit dance promised a decolonized future, where the relationship between humans and nature were restored and white men were wiped off the face of the earth. The stomps in the spirit dance were sometimes literally supposed to be stomping the white man under the earth. The spirit dance inspired Natives across North America facing genocide and gave them the hope to continue resisting, rather than dying and/or assimilating. This contribution changes the course of US Native history in two dramatic ways: 1) First, it inspires the resistance of the Lakota Sioux, one of the most resistant indigenous nations of North America, who interpreted Wovoka’s teachings in a way that inspired violent resistance. The book does an excellent job here delineating between Wovoka’s teachings and differing between varying Paiute, Lakota, and federal white man interpretations of them. The Lakota Sioux popularized the spirit dance the most and led a resistance movement to be crushed but not vanquished at Wounded Knee. 2) Because the dance was associated with anticolonial indigenous movements, the US government outlawed all Native dance, ceremonial, and religious practices. The US also anglicized the name as the Ghost Dance to give it a spookier, more terrorist edge. These are two pivotal moments of North American native history where Wovoka played a critical role! On top of all that, there is some speculation that Wovoka’s teachings were somewhat inspired by Mormonism. Wovoka incorporated Christian theology into his teachings in ways that aren’t entirely clear to me, but Wovoka clearly occupies a similar mystic and revelatory lineage of the era, which includes Joseph Smith. The LDS (Mormon) teaching that Jesus visited the Americas and that Natives are a Jewish, Biblical people was apparently sometimes interpreted by some Natives to mean Jesus was Native and some went as far to identify Wovoka with a reincarnation of Jesus. I wish I could talk about this history with my former students in Cedar City, as there’s a lot of layers here. If folks have recommendations on more reads relevant to Wovoka, please let me know. 5/5 

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition / Cedric Robinson / 1963

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition / Cedric Robinson / 1963

I have no business criticizing this book, largely because I’m out of my depth, especially when Robinson gets REAL specific about the economics of 17th century UK. An interesting paradox about the book is that its the technical language and academic discourses, when utilized, isn’t inaccessible to a lay audience; yet the range and scope of the project of the project was so expansive, it definitely demands re-reading to fully absorb Robinson’s ideas and arguments, much as Angela Davis suggested in her blurb. Because contemporary US Black scholars sometimes fail to think beyond the US, I was impressed to find such a comprehensive history of the Black Radical Tradition that included the history of the Caribbean and Latin America. There’s a chance this book doesn’t include feminist perspectives enough, as there are likely more women who figure into this tradition in ways unacknowledged herein, Sojourner Truth for example. The conversations and relationships between the international communists and Black communities, the consistent and furious revolts against slavery, his contextualizing of Du Bois and Cesaire, and many other moments re-organized my understanding of Black history in the Americas. While reading, I had the stupefying realization that other ideas familiar to me likely originated from Robinson’s masterpiece. I want to re-read this book with people smarter than me. 4.5/5  

Our History is Our Future: Standing Rock Vs the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance / Nick Estes / 2019

Our History is Our Future: Standing Rock Vs the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance / Nick Estes / 2019

I slept on this book for a bit because I thought that all the news I read and conversations with friends on the ground would have made some of the information in this book redundant. That wasn’t the case at all. In fact, I’d argue that Nick Estes performs here a version of what Cedric Robinson performed in Black Marxism. I found particularly moving Estes’s discussion of the Ghost Dance movement, led by a Paiute prophet Wovoka. In my experience, Paiutes are extremely marginalized, even in Native circles, and are frequently portrayed as a largely peaceful, undefiant band of Natives, so finding such a monumental figure in the history of Indigenous resistance was exciting. I also deeply appreciated Estes’ discussion of the AIM movement and its transition away from armed militant struggle to international solidarity campaigns. I was unaware of the role indigenous nations played in the UN and their ties to Palestine. Indeed, it was horrifying to learn of Israel’s role in Standing Rock as well. Israel shared its crowd control technologies and referred to the water protectors as a Hamas insurgency in the US (maybe slightly paraphrased here). US forces particularly targeted Middle Eastern, and of course, Palestinian activists who participated. This book was infuriating and inspiring to read and I’m so grateful for it. 5/5  

Delta of Venus / Anais Nin / 1977

Delta of Venus / Anais Nin / 1977

I read this book in the dead of night after waking up and not being able to fall asleep. It felt like an appropriate choice for the occasions. In the introduction, Nin describes how Henry James had a patron who paid literati for erotica and a few authors of the period would write for this patron when low on cash. This patron, however, only wanted the mechanical action of sex, the camera up-close on every page, taking all the life and joy and tension out of sex. While I expected a book that read like a strong and spicy old school romance novel, what I actually got was much more enrichening and deep. Nin largely actively counteracts the pornographic reader’s gaze by including short stories with taboo acts, including pedophilia, incest, sexual violence, etc. Nin’s builds tension by portraying the tug and tussle between different characters as they navigate sexuality almost always without much sexual experience or education, a language for consent, or a language for queer gender and sexuality. Some parts of the book are like reading Lolita by Nabokov. Others brought me back to the sexual confusion of my youth, where romance was frequently like trying to participate in a scene where you don’t know what role you play or any of your lines. The stories gave me the language to describe violations and beauty I’ve experienced, sometimes intermixed. I didn’t expect that at all. Nin has made me realize how impoverished much of our erotic scenes in literature are. Even the racism in the book and outdated ideas about gender are fascinating for what they reveal about Nin’s society’s relationship to race and sexuality and how they interact. Only one or so stories included a racist trope that failed to add any literary merit and actively ruined the whole damn short story. I’m glad I read this. 4.5 out of 5

The Little Book of Restorative Justice / Howard Zehr / 2002

The Little Book of Restorative Justice / Howard Zehr / 2002

I read this book in preparation for a job interview (Pray for me yall). I was impressed by its ability to open a can of worms, let you get a good glimpse inside, close it, then move onto the next can of worms. This is no easy task for issues as fraught as justice and for a practice as varied, situational, and complex as restorative justice. Though published over 20 years ago, it hardly feels outdated in the United States, especially since so much of the United States has yet to adopt restorative justice in a serious way. I highly recommend it for folks looking to see if they are interested in a deeper dive. 5/5

When Love was Reels / Jose B. Gonzalez / 2017

When Love was Reels / Jose B. Gonzalez / 2017

I also feel guilty as hell for sleeping on this touching collection. It’s an utter shame this book hasn’t gotten more attention and love, because what it pulls off takes a lot of work. Literally  every single poem in the collection takes a classic film or TV Show, largely from Latin or Latino America, and uses them as a window into his childhood in El Salvador, as well as his experience migrating and his youth in New York. Early on, the movies created a space where he could witness his abuela reflect on intense experiences brought on by movies. Later on, TV is how he learns English and an activity his tio and him would essentially disassociate to together. Gonzalez also weaves throughout the collection an unrequited love story between him and a school-age crush he left behind in El Salvador. Gonzalez’s bare and straightforward style is impressive. The sort of feeling you get after having a real soulful conversation with a stranger after they open up about something tender in their childhood. Also, this book belongs in the canon of hip-hop poetics. A solid chunk of it is devoted to Gonzalez’s adventures in graffiti art. I want to teach a Latino film studies course where all we do is read this book and watch all the films in it. Someone should do that someday. 4/5

Tesoro / Yesika Salgado / 2018

Tesoro / Yesika Salgado / 2018 
Here, Salgado gets tantalizingly close to evolving as a poet. Poems like “Nostalgia,” “Excuses,” and “In Our Family” probe Salgado’s Salvadoran heritage in a meaningful way, but the collection quickly gives way to Salgado’s most well-trod obsession: heartbreak. Here, the poems do not get more thoughtful or interrogative than her Instagram, which is fine. Reading Salgado feels to me like reading one of my single tia’s diaries, only in my family those tia’s are liable to squeeze my ass unexpectedly and sour a family party. I’m glad Salgado doesn’t do that.  Jokes aside, if I sound salty, it’s mostly because as arguably the most popular and wide-reaching Salvadoran poet with an enormous talent in performance and true gut-punching vulnerability, it would mean a lot to see Salgado move beyond her signature moves. Tesoro was supposed to do that. In the introduction, Salgado states that when she began writing Tesoro she wanted to write a bilingual collection where she gathered her family’s stories of survival. Instead, she inverted her gaze inward again, eschewing a tougher project to lick her own wounds again. For me, this is a 2 out of 5, despite some standout poems.

Art of Exile / William Archila / 2009

Art of Exile / William Archila / 2009

I’m so sad I slept on this gorgeous book for so many years. Archila narrates migration and warfare with a deceptively plainspoken style. Archila’s tenderness with his images and memories re-constitute the violence described in these poems. Rather than acts of terror reeking of gratuitous violence and voyeurism, Archila carves out a space of intimacy and privacy to breathe life into the dead and their survivors. This is not easy to do. It's hard to describe violence of this scale without rifling the reader with shock and agony. I don’t know what Archila did with his anger, but I wouldn’t say it’s a standout part of the collection. Here, Archila has performed the sacred alchemy of grieving. His bluesy style and step make the moments bearable while still feeling the sob of its sorrow. If you’re a fan of Komunyakaa and Dalton, look no further than Archila.

4.5/5 

Diaries of a Terrorist / Christopher Soto / 2022

Diaries of a Terrorist / Christopher Soto / 2023 

Diaries of a Terrorist / Christopher Soto / 2022

Fans of sad girl poems will find more to love as Soto’s pen goes beyond the queer coming-of-age narratives of their first collection, extending its vision to a critique of the prison industrial complex at large. Soto’s mix of punk, play, pain, and perversion cries while it laughs while it comes. The rare moments of laziness (the ending lines of Transgender Cyborgs Attack, for example) are easy to forgive when poems like “Concerning Our Necropolitical Landscape,” “Transactional Sex with Satan,” and “Two Lovers in Perfect Synchronicity” buttress them. The title Diaries of a Terrorist seems a bit like a misdirection, as the collection doesn’t consider revolutionary violence much at all, except for a poem “In Support of Violence,” which narrates the vengeance hundreds of Indian survivors took murdering their rapist. Of course, that’s perhaps the point: terrorists are first and foremost people with complex interior worlds and relationships, not just frenzied mass murderers. Still, the tenderness barely hidden in between Soto’s barbaric yawping betrays a much softer soul. Elsewhere, in Piscucha Magazine, Soto confessed “I hate the word revolution. I hate its bloody reality.” I don’t resent Soto for this, but I do think the title might understandably misdirect a reader looking for a poet whose political vision includes or interrogates revolutionary violence more explicitly and thoughtfully. I want to teach a queer poetry class where I teach this alongside fei hernandez, Danez Smith, and Marylyn Tan. 4/5